I Hate Glass

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Forget circles. Forget copper. I mean, sure, I get that I'm not supposed to use or pick up copper, but glass just completely freaks me out.

I'm more scared of glass than I am of spiders. And I'm really scared of spiders, so scared I couldn't even use this "World Wide Web" until I'd sprayed the monitor with insect repellent.

Why do I harbour an obviously irrational fear of something so common in everyday life?

Let's break down the reasons I live in morbid fear of glass:

It's not a solid, it just pretends to be one. Someone in the depths of my memory claimed that glass is actually a super-cooled liquid, and I believe them. You can see old windows thicker at their base than at the top, as the glass slowly melts downwards, slowly plotting our demise over aeons.

Glass is everywhere. Glasses. Windows.

It breaks into millions of billions of tiny little shards. Sure, shards might be triangles, but I think the glass really wants to be round. Like mercury.

If any one of the aforementioned tiny shards ends up in your bloodstream, it can kill you.

A big shard can damage you as well. There is no upside to a glass shard.

The little tiny shards are so hard to see.

The little tiny shards are currently coating my bedroom floor.

Okay, so there's a fairly immediate reason to fear glass in my case - my girlfriend broke a large mirror on the bedroom floor, next to the walk-in closet that my clothes sometimes end up in.

I spent from 1:00am to about 1:45am last night trying to vaccuum up all the glinting bits on the carpet, but I know I've missed some. I know it's going to show up by piercing my foot at some point in the future maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, maybe not for the next three or four years.

Glass has time. As H.G. Wells once said about another alien menace: "Slowly, and surely, they drew their plans against us".

So what to do about the glass threat?

The answer may already be among us. We know from Star Trek IV that Scotty gave the formula for transparent aluminium to a scientist somewhere in America during the late 80's, while we were busy hunting the whales to extinction. We also know that the dynamics alone for such a thing might take years to work out, but that when they are finally worked out, that bloke will be a rich man.

Well, soon-to-be-rich man that invents transparent aluminium, it's been years. You've had the time, and I am queuing up to give you my money for a new, unshatterable mirror. If you can't deliver, please give the formula to someone that can.